Praise for Norman Mailer
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any writer of his generation.”
—The New York Times
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”
—The New Yorker
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”
—The Washington Post
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”
—Life
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”
—The New York Review of Books
“The largest mind and imagination at work [in modern] American literature … Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”
—The Cincinnati Post
2013 Random House eBook Edition
Copyright © 1951, 1979 by Norman Mailer
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Rinehart & Company, Inc., New York, in 1951.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mailer, Norman.
Barbary shore / by Norman Mailer.
eISBN: 978-0-8129-8598-6
www.atrandom.com
v3.1
To Jean Malaquais
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
ONE
PROBABLY I was in the war. There is the mark of a wound behind my ear, an oblong of unfertile flesh where no hair grows. It is covered over now, and may be disguised by even the clumsiest barber, but no barber can hide the scar on my back. For that a tailor is more in order.
When I stare into the mirror I am returned a face doubtless more handsome than the original, but the straight nose, the modelled chin, and the smooth cheeks are only evidence of a stranger’s art. It does not matter how often I decide the brown hair and the gray eyes must have always been my own; there is nothing I can recognize, not even my age. I am certain I cannot be less than twenty-five and it is possible I am older, but thanks to whoever tended me, a young man without a wrinkle in his skin stands for a portrait in the mirror.
There was a time when I would try rather frantically to recall what kind of accident it had been and where it had occurred. I could almost picture the crash of an airplane and the flames entering my cockpit. No sooner had I succeeded, however, than the airplane became a tank and I was trapped within, only to create another environment; the house was burning and a timber pinned my back. Such violence ends with the banality of beads; grenades, shell, bombardment—I can elaborate a hundred such, and none seem correct.
Here and there, memories return. Only it is difficult to trust them. I am positive my parents are dead, that I grew up in an institution for children, and was always poor. Still, there are times when I think I remember my mother, and I have the idea I received an education. The deaf are supposed to hear a myriad of noises, and silence is filled with the most annoying rattle and tinkle and bell; the darkness of the blind is marred by erratic light; thus memory for me was never a wall but more a roulette of the most extraordinary events and the most insignificant, all laced into the same vessel until I could not discern the most casual fact from the most patent fancy, nor the past from the future; and the details of my own history were lost in the other, common to us all. I could never judge whether something had happened to me or I imagined it so. It made little difference whether I had met a man or he existed only in a book; there was never a way to determine if I knew a country or merely remembered another’s description. The legends from a decade of newsprint were as intimate and distant as the places in which I must have lived. No history belonged to me and so all history was mine. Yet in what a state. Each time my mind furnished a memory long suppressed it was only another piece, and there were so few pieces and so much puzzle.
During one period I made prodigious efforts to recover the past. I conducted a massive correspondence with the secretaries of appropriate officials; I followed people upon the street because they had looked at me with curiosity; I searched lists of names, studied photographs, and lay on my bed bludgeoning my mind to confess a single material detail. Prodigious efforts, but I recovered nothing except to learn that I had no past and was therefore without a future. The blind grow ears, the deaf learn how to see, and I acquired both in compensation; it was natural, even obligatory, that the present should possess the stage.
And as time possessed the present I began to retain what had happened to me in the previous week, the previous month, and that became my experience, became all my experience. If it were circumscribed it was nonetheless a world, and a year from the time I first found myself with no name in my pocket, I could masquerade like anyone else. I lived like the hermit in the desert who sweats his penance and waits for a sign. There was none and probably there will be none—I doubt if I shall find my childhood and my youth—but I have come to understand the skeleton perhaps of that larger history, and not everything is without its purpose. I have even achieved a balance, if that is what it may be called.
Now, in the time I write, when other men besides myself must contrive a name, a story, and the papers they carry, I wonder if I do not possess an advantage. For I have been doing it longer, and am tantalized less by the memory of better years. They must suffer, those others like myself. I wonder what fantasies bother them?
There is one I have regularly. It seems as if only enough time need elapse for me to forget before it appears again:
I see a traveller. He is most certainly not myself. A plump middle-aged man, and I have the idea he has just finished a long trip. He has landed at an airfield or his train has pulled into a depot. It hardly matters which.
He is in a hurry to return home. With impatience he suffers the necessary delays in collecting his baggage, and when the task is finally done, he hails a taxi, installs his luggage, bawls out his instructions, and settles back comfortably in the rear seat. Everything is so peaceful. Indolently he turns his head to watch children playing a game upon the street.
He is weary, he d
iscovers, and his breath comes heavily. Unfolding his newspaper he attempts to study it, but the print blurs and he lays the sheet down. Suddenly and unaccountably he is quite depressed. It has been a long trip he reassures himself. He looks out the window.
The cab is taking the wrong route!
What shall he do? It seems so simple to raise his hand and tap upon the glass, but he feels he dare not disturb the driver. Instead, he looks through the window once more.
The man lives in this city, but he has never seen these streets. The architecture is strange, and the people are dressed in unfamiliar clothing. He looks at a sign, but it is printed in an alphabet he cannot read.
His hand folds upon his heart to still its beating. It is a dream, he thinks, hugging his body in the rear of the cab. He is dreaming and the city is imaginary and the cab is imaginary. And on he goes.
I shout at him. You are wrong, I cry, although he does not hear me; this city is the real city, the material city, and your vehicle is history. Those are the words I use, and then the image shatters.
Night comes and I am alone with a candle. What has been fanciful is now concrete. Although the room in which I write has an electric circuit, it functions no longer. Time passes and I wait by the door, listening to the footsteps of roomers as they go out to work for the night. In fourteen hours they will be back.
So the blind lead the blind and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
TWO
I SUPPOSE even a magic box must have its handle. Yet once the box is opened, I wonder if it is too unreasonable that the handle is then ignored. I am more concerned with the contents. If I begin with Willie Dinsmore, it is because he served as a handle; and I, who was to serve for so long as the sorcerer’s apprentice, forgot him quickly.
Let me describe how I was living at the time. I had a bed in one of those young men’s dormitories which seem always to be constructed about a gymnasium and a cafeteria. Since such organizations are inevitably founded on the principle that people should be forced to enjoy each other’s presence, I suffered through a succession of bunkmates, and found once again the unique loneliness which comes from living without privacy. I would hardly have chosen to stay there, but I had little choice. Through all that year, in which I received no mail and moved beyond a nodding acquaintance with very few people, I worked at a succession of unskilled jobs and with a discipline I would hardly have expected in myself put away regularly at the end of the week a sum of ten dollars. I was driven with the ambition that I should be a writer, and I was grubbing quite appropriately for a grubstake. My project was to save five hundred dollars and then find an inexpensive room: calculated virtually to the penny, I found that if the rent were less than five dollars a week, I would have enough money to live for six months and I could write my novel or at least begin it.
The cash finally accumulated, I searched for a cheap place of my own, but the place was never cheap enough. I flushed corners for thirty dollars a month, for forty dollars, and more, but they would have exhausted my savings too rapidly. I was growing somewhat desperate until Willie Dinsmore, after weeks of jockeying me on a puppeteer’s string, gave me his room.
Dinsmore was a playwright. Being also a husband and a father, he found difficulty in working at home and therefore kept a small furnished cubicle in a brownstone house in Brooklyn Heights. Once, in passing, he told me he would let the room go when he went away for the summer, and I had coaxed a promise that I would get the vacancy. Since we knew each other only casually, I made a point afterward never to lose contact with him for very long. Dinsmore’s niche cost only four dollars a week, and there was not another so inexpensive to be discovered.
I would pay him a visit from time to time and note with all the pleasure of an eager customer each small advantage the house had to offer. Certainly I was easy to please. Although I would be situated on the top floor beneath a flat roof and have for ventilation but a single window, opening upon laundry lines and back yards to the fire escape of an apartment house upon the next street, it never occured to me how oppressive and sultry a hole this might become.
A small room, not more than eight feet wide, one had to edge sideways between the desk and the bed to reach the window. The paint was years old and had soiled to the ubiquitous yellow-brown of cheap lodgings. Its surface blistered and buckled, large swatches of plaster had fallen, and in a corner the ceiling was exposed to the lath. Cinders drifted up from the dock area below the bluffs to cover the woodwork. The sash cord was broken, and the window rested in all its weight upon two empty beer cans which served as support. Even at four dollars a week the bargain was not conspicuous, but I was enamored of it.
I would sit on the bed and watch Dinsmore sort his papers, scatter dust from the desk to the floor, and mop his face. He was a short stocky man whose favorite position was astraddle a chair, chin resting on the back, and his body bent forward. He looked like a football lineman in this posture, and his head, which resembled a boxer dog, could hardly contradict the impression. Having told him nothing about myself, and indeed I was hardly in the habit, he made the assumption that I was a war veteran, and I never bothered to explain there might be some doubt. Dinsmore was happier this way in any case. Like so many writers he had very little interest in people, and if they could serve his didactic demands, a pigeonhole was all he required. I had been installed immediately in the one he undoubtedly labelled Postwar Problems.
“I’ll tell you, kid,” he would say, “it’s a shame the way people got to live doubled up in rooms, and lots of you GI’s”—his voice was pitched deferentially when he spoke about veterans—“the ones who’re married and living with their in-laws and their marriages are going to pot all cause they can’t get a lousy apartment. It’s the fault of the real estate interests, and it’s a crime that we fight an anti-fascist war and don’t clean out the fascists in our own house, but I’ll tell you, Mikey, they’re making a mistake, they’re cutting their own throat, cause the veterans aren’t going to stand for it.”
I never knew whether he believed this, or if it came from the desire to vindicate his plays. The poorest strain in his writing had been the kind of superficial optimism prevalent during the war, which still lasted posthumously among the many playwrights and novelists whose lack of political sophistication was satisfied by dividing all phenomena into Dinsmore’s categories. At bottom it was only a temporary mode of that great crutch to the simple-minded:—the right guy and the wrong-o—and already to the confusion and the eventual danger of men like Willie the names had changed.
Willie kept his head down, however, and his eye to the measure. His hero was still the young anti-fascist who had come back from the war and gave the speech about the world he fought to make. The speech was not new, but an old speech never hurt a playwright, and Dinsmore doubled his success in a thematic sequel whose young veteran told the audience what kind of world he wanted for his infant.
It will be apparent by now, I fear, that I was not precisely infatuated with Willie. He had a home, he had a family, he had a reputation, and any one of the three was more than I could expect. But Willie found other homes as well. He had the kind of mind which could not bear any question taking longer than ten seconds to answer. “There are the haves and the have-nots,” Willie would declare; “there are the progressive countries and the reactionary countries. In half the globe the people own the means of production, and in the other half the fascists have control.”
I would offer a mild objection. “It’s just as easy to say that in every country the majority have very little. Such a division is probably the basis of society.”
Willie reacted with a hurt smile and a compassionate look in his face. Whenever I contradicted him, he would change the subject. “You take the theatre. It’s sick, Mikey, you know why? All commercialized. What we need is a people’s theatre again, you know where you pay a quarter, tie-ups with unions, school kids, where you can show the facts of life. A worker’s theatre.”
“The problem is to give it back to the people. The classical theatre was always progressive. Art is a people’s fight.”
To elaborate at such length upon Willie is not completely necessary, but I wanted to give a small portrait of him because he was the first person to mention Beverly Guinevere to me, and his description had its effect long after I knew it was untrue, and colored many nuances. If I had had any judgment, I would have known that Willie was innocent and his perceptions about people had no more chance of being accurate than a man who hurls a stone at a target he cannot see. But to possess judgment was another matter. My face allowed people to think that I was only twenty, and in a reciprocal of that relation I often felt like an adolescent first entering the adult world where everyone is strange and individual. I was always too ready to mistake opinion for fact.
The first time I heard Guinevere’s name Willie was in the process of using it as a springboard for one of his lectures. “Someday,” Willie threatened, “I’ll sic the landlady on you.” He paused, rocking the chair on its legs. “She’s a character, wait’ll you meet her. I’ll tell you, Mikey, when you find out the score you’ll stay away from her.”
“Why?”
“If she gets alone in the same room with you, you won’t be safe.” He paused again. “Guinevere’s a nymphomaniac.”
I remember that I grinned. “What happened to you, Willie?”
“Nothing. She’s not my type. You know she’s kind of old, and she’s fat.” He pursed his lips judiciously. “And then I’ll tell you, Mikey, extramarital relations are different when you’re married, I mean there’s the psychological angle to consider. And when you got kids there’s always the danger of disease, of going blind, having a leg fall off. I may not have been a GI, but I saw that venereal movie, too.” And intrigued, he shook his head. “You remember the guy who couldn’t talk, who just whistled? Holy Cow, I tell you we need Health Clinics all over the country, especially in the South. I made a tour through there last year to gather some material, and Jesus, the ignorance.”
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